~ …give that you may live, for to withhold is to perish. (Adapted from Kahlil Gibran)

BYOT #2 – In Practice #byod

Note: This is the 2nd in a series of BYOT session–although this one is a webinar that was facilitated by @mray29 to 70 high school educators–outlines I developed for a 5A school district. I’m grateful to the district, and especially, @mray29 and @mlowak for their hard work in making this outline work so well as a presentation.

Note: I’ll try to post a link to the recording once it becomes available.

Session Description: In this practitioner-oriented session, participants will learn about instructional models that take advantage of student-owned devices, cooperative learning strategies, and are discussed in the context of successful strategies in use by other BYOT educators. Two approaches are offered as examples of how to approach teaching and learning in the BYOT-Powered Classroom.

Outline of Slideshow:

5 Keys to Successful BYOT Praxis – This session will introduce successful teaching and learning strategies employed by other BYOT educators, and introduce you to 5 key concepts that make BYOT easy.

5 Locked Doors to BYOT Success include the following:

Device specific content – For too long, we’ve created content for delivery through one medium or another, whether that be paper-n-pencil, MS Office, etc. We need to find ways to make our content “device agnostic.”

Require products from students that are the same old stuff they’ve been required to do all their lives.

Make it hard for students to turn in their digital work from whatever device they’re using.

Don’t take advantage of video/audio tools available to get content out there ahead of time for students to review.

Try to manage 10+ different places where students are saving their content.

How do you get past these locked doors? This presentation will introduce you to several different keys.

Key Concept #1 – Digital Content Curator

“We’ve trained teachers over 3 years to manage, deliver, create, implement, and appropriate select digital content, resources, and 3rd party services to build on their TEKS and student needs.” –a Texas School District

Introduction to Two Content Curation Tools that are helpful for students

Evernote

Diigo for Education

Key Concept #2 – Differentiating Product Creation

Product differentiation involves allowing students to show, in varied ways, what they know, understand and are able to do.

The key to a differentiated classroom is that all students are regularly offered CHOICES and students are matched with tasks compatible with their individual learner profiles. Curriculum should be differentiated in three areas:

Content: Multiple options for taking in information

Process: Multiple options for making sense of the ideas

Product: Multiple options for expressing what they know

Questions to ask:

What tools do my students know or might they learn to use?

What digital technologies can students bring with them to school to assist in their learning?

Will the digital technologies that are part of the options for students really improve their learning relative to standards, objectives, and intended learning results?

Several ways to setup an online storage area for your classroom. One of the easiest is to use GoogleApps for Education, which comes with its own “GoogleDrive,” a hard drive that you and your students can use to share documents, videos, audio, and a variety of files. It works with most mobile devices.

Make it easy to turn in homework/classwork through the use of Edmodo.com, or if you need even more functionality, get a Moodle virtual classroom (available in February, 2013).

Key Concept #4 – Flip Your Classroom

The Flipped Classroom model is the shifting of the classroom paradigm, so that lectures can be seen at home, while homework activities are done in class. This is to allow more time for applying the knowledge and receiving more personal help from the educator.

3 Tips for Flipping Your Classroom

Record video/audio/screencasts and make those available to students, even when they are not connected to the Internet. Encourage students to record videos about lessons and concepts then to share those with you prior to inclusion in a class GoogleSite wiki.

Use a tool like Evernote or Diigo–that work on mobile devices–to facilitate note-taking, turning in assignments, and information sharing.

Use Technology like Edmodo to make it easy to facilitate conversations about content.

Set up a YouTube channel for your lessons that students can access from home (although be aware they won’t be able to see it at school…for that, you’ll need a shared GoogleDrive folder).

Key Concept #5 – Embrace Edmodo.com as Your Classroom and Social Hub

You can’t BYOT unless you have ONE place to share content, to bring it all together. Edmodo.com can be that ONE place to bring content together.